Fresh from the oven. 

The world's best chocolate chip cookie recipe 
(that happens to be vegan and gluten free)

Are you a sucker for soft, chewy, melty chocolate chip cookies?  The kind that oozes with chocolate and retains its softness days after baking (if they last that long)?  If so, then these are for you. 

I developed this recipe after a long quest for the perfect (vegan, gluten free) chocolate chip cookie recipe.  The batter tastes great raw or frozen (if you know you don't even want to bother baking them you can leave out the baking soda), and makes an excellent ice cream sandwich cookie. 

The batter is easily customizable for various holidays and flavor preferences; a few options are given below but feel free to experiment with anything that sounds good to you!  

INGREDIENTS

-- 1 cup (1/2 lb.) Earth Balance buttery sticks, at room temperature
-- 1.5 cups firmly packed light brown sugar
-- 2 eggs' worth of egg replacer mixed with warm water (follow instructions on side of box for powder-to-water ratio) 
-- 1.5 teaspoons vanilla
-- 2.5 cups all-purpose gluten free flour, sifted 
-- 1 teaspoon baking soda
-- .5 teaspoon salt
-- 2 cups vegan chocolate chips, chunks, or slivers broken off a chocolate bar
-- Course grain sea salt 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 400° Fahrenheit and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. 

2. In a bowl, with an electric mixer on medium speed, beat Earth Balance and brown sugar until well blended. 

3. Beat in vegan egg mixture and vanilla until smooth, scraping down sides of bowl as needed.

4. In another bowl, mix flour, baking soda, and salt. 

5. Stir or beat dry flour mixture into butter mixture until well incorporated. 

6. Stir in chocolate chips, using your hands if necessary to blend evenly. 

7. PInch off a 2-inch chunk of batter and roll between your palms until it forms a smooth sphere.  Then pull the sphere into two equal pieces, exposing the rough interior.  Reconnect the two pieces by pushing them together with the rough interiors exposed; they will now serve as the top of the cookie.  (This is what gives the cookie its textured shape.)

8. Repeat step 7 with remaining dough, placing cookies directly on the cookie sheet lined with parchment paper (no grease needed). 

9. Sprinkle course sea salt on top of each cookie. 

10. Bake at 400° oven 6 to 8 minutes.  Cookies will appear soft and gooey when done, but not completely doughy.  

11. Once out of the oven, wait a couple minutes before transferring cookies to a cooling rack or tray with a wide spatula.  

MODIFICATIONS

The options are endless!  

-- Peppermint Chocolate Chip Cookies: replace vanilla extract with peppermint extract or oil, and add crushed candy canes to the tops of the cookies as soon as they come out of the oven. 

-- Orange Chocolate Chip Cookies: add 1 teaspoon orange extract to batter along with vanilla extract

-- Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies: replace roughly .25 cup flour with sifted unsweetened cocoa powder

-- Espresso Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies: replace roughly .25 cup flour with sifted unsweetened cocoa powder and add 1 - 2 tablespoons instant espresso flour that's been mixed and dissolved in 2 tablespoons of hot water 

why vegan? why not?

People often ask me why I'm vegan.  It's a question I've been thinking about in some form or another (with "vegetarian" replacing "vegan" until about five years ago) since I was twelve and stopped eating mammals.

Let me first say this: I did not stop eating meat because I didn't like how it tasted, or because I thought eating meat was "gross."  I actually loved the taste of meat, and the idea of one animal eating another animal's flesh for food is not a gross or unnatural idea to me.  

But just because it makes sense for some animals -- including some people -- to eat other animals, I decided that, on balance, it just does not make sense for me to eat them (or products that come from them).  

The summer I was twelve was the first time I ever spent any significant time thinking about what "meat" really is, and connecting it in a conscious way to the animals I'd grown up with on the small farm in Norway I spent my summers at, or to the animals I read about in books or saw in fields on the side of the road when I drove through rural parts of the US or Norway. 

And it was the first time I ever thought about how these magnificent creatures -- the cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens -- that I saw on farms transform into the skinless, boneless, limp rosy lumps lying on a rectangle of black styrofoam and wrapped tightly in glistening Shrinkwrap. 

The entire industrialized world is constructed around the idea that we are not meant to think about that process.  Grocery stores do not want us to think about it.  Parents trying to get their children to eat their dinners do not want us to think about it. 

But I did think about it, a lot, and then I began reading about it, or trying to as best I could in a pre-internet world.  I could go on for paragraphs about what I learned -- about the environmental destruction caused by the meat industry, the inefficiency of feeding grain to livestock instead of to directly to people, the inhumane conditions that farm animals exist in from birth to death, the unnatural chemicals and medicines we pump animals full of to keep them alive and germ-free and growing as big and meaty as possible . . . but there are countless books and articles that have spoken much more eloquently on these subjects than I can here. 

In the end, I realized that the only reason I could think of to continue eating meat and animal products was that it tasted good.  That's it, pure and simple.  I do not need to eat animal products to meet my nutritional needs, as some animals and even some people in the remotest corners of the earth do.  It is no sacrifice to be vegan: the world of plant-based food is vast and deliciously varied, with a wider spectrum of color and texture and flavor than most of us have ever experienced.  

I realized that if I placed deliciousness on one side of a scale, no amount of it could come close to outweighing the discomfort, boredom, grief, fear, and pain that animals must be put through to transform into those rosy lumps in shrinkwrapped packages.  Imagine a see-saw with a small child on one side and a sumo wrestler on the other: no contest. 

Why am I vegan?  Why not? 

p.s. 

Some interesting facts and figures about the global impact of meat consumption are here:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat

mouthfeelfoodlove defined.

mouthfeel.  noun.  
1. the sensation created by food or drink in the mouth.  
2. the act of having ideas, emotions, and feelings about what one puts in one's mouth. 
3. the art of allowing one's feelings to guide one's decisions about what to eat. 

foodlove.  noun.  
1. the emotion created by the love of the taste, sight, smell, and sound of food.
2. the art of allowing love and respect of animals and the environment to guide one's choices about what to eat.